"Quintessential Englishness and the quivering heart that beats beneath the stiff upper lip. This is a most wonderful story about love and friendship, and how duty can get in the way of both. Perfect performances by Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr, and Roger Livesey as the colonel. When Theo, played by Walbrook, the colonel’s adversary in wartime but now his friend, announces to him that Edith (Kerr) and he are to be married, both the colonel and Edith realize that his stiff upper lip has gotten in the way of their chance at real love. The directors capture this moment so tenderly and beautifully it is impossible not to cry. Set against the backdrop of forty years of twentieth-century war, it is a very sad film that is also both exciting and hilarious. Churchill decided it was negative propaganda and banned it. Michael Powell proposed marriage to Miss Kerr in Hyde Park, opposite the entrance to the Dorchester hotel. She declined. A movie about broken hearts."

"Alderton has been writing for UK newspapers and magazines for years, and then she wrote this book about love, but not necessarily about finding the love of a man. There’s a very deep female friendship at the heart of it. As a writer myself, anytime I write something that feels painful to tell, and you don’t know how people will respond to it, you’re laying yourself open to be criticized—as a woman especially, when you’re writing about people you’ve slept with and the bad choices you’ve made again and again. As soon as I read it,I got in touch with Alderton. I said ‘Please, please let me buy the rights to this book and let me make it,’ but someone had got there before me. It’s about not giving up, and not losing sight of the thing you’re after just because life has fucked you a few times along the way."

"Actually, I just thought of another one which really affected me. I don’t know if I’m going to pronounce it correctly. It’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf — Lovers on the Pont-Neuf [aka Lovers on the Bridge]. It has Juliette Binoche in it and Denis Lavant. He’s very good. I was a university student when this came out. It’s kind of a love story of a privileged girl who’s going blind and she kind of runs away from her privileged life to live on the streets. And she falls in love eventually or creates this friendship with this homeless man. It’s an extraordinary film. It just blew my mind. Again, the filmmaking was incredibly brave and just committed and front-foot and so unique. Again, a film that looks at relationships and has a life in the characters — very alive. I don’t know. It was just an experience to watch that film. I just love it."

"The best book I’ve ever received as a gift was actually the best gift I ever received from my mother, too. When I was young, she gave me “Letters: Summer 1926,” about the three-way correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak. Three brilliant minds that had never met, all writing sonnets and passionate letters to each other for four years, eventually falling in love with each other through this correspondence. Seeing this love triangle unfold through actual letters was very exciting for me as a young girl. Later in life, I met Susan Sontag, and she told me she wanted to give me a new edition of a book for which she had recently written the foreword. You can understand my surprise when I discovered it was this very same book. She was always giving me books over the course of our friendship, but this one is the most precious to me, especially since she is no longer with us"